Jinnah's speech

While the intended broadcast was stalled by reasons best known to people who are probably long dead, Jinnah's thoughts on religion in his state were bluntly articulated in his maiden speech to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August 1947. Among other things, Pakistan's leader made it clear that "you are free to go to your mosques and to your temples" because the religion of a Pakistani was "of no concern of the state". He further hoped that in time Pakistan would develop to be a modern polity where "a Hindu will cease to be a Hindu and a Muslim to be a Muslim, not in a religious sense but in his relationship to the state". It is worth mentioning that the presiding officer of that historic session was the noted Bengali lawyer Jogendra Nath Mondal.

Of course, those who followed Mr. Jinnah as head of state had little tolerance for that kind of modernism. But none went as far as the dictator General Ziaul Haque who had his henchmen literally expunge the "offending" remarks from the historical records maintained by the Pakistan Parliament Secretariat. Furthermore, the self-styled "Mard-e-Momin" (Man of Faith) also removed the excerpt of Jinnah's August 11 speech from the premises of the Pakistan Supreme Court building. Similar doctoring took place in school textbooks across Pakistan where entire sentences of Jinnah's speeches were removed. The legacy of a Western educated, Saville Row suited, secular Shia Muslim Mohammad Ali Jinnah was too dangerous for the designs of petty tyrants whose famed Islamic Republic officially considers a woman worth half a man and a Ahmadiyya Muslim a non-entity.